The Comedy Continues

 Ready for some more (!!!) stories from our trip? Our Saturday in Florida was full of them!

It was another drizzly, overcast day, but we were determined to make the best of it!

I had planned our trip so completely, and this day began with one of my favorite ideas of the entire trip. I found that there was a farmers' market nearby, and I thought it would be SO much fun to go to the market, do a scavenger hunt, and see what we could find for $20 to eat for lunch. I had gotten on Pinterest at home and found a few market scavenger hunts, picked my favorites from each, and made my own. I hoped we could find some great wraps or crepes or something for lunch.

Wellllllll.... (!!!)

We arrived, and this was the extent of the market:

Given that we were in a large city, I did expect something a little bigger! But it was not bigger. It was this. No fresh flowers. No live music. No old couples holding hands. No kids on their dads' shoulders. The scavenger hunt finds were slim indeed. 

Know what else they didn't have? Prepared food. So unless we wanted to chomp on an eggplant and wash it down with a jar of homemade spices, we were out of luck. Scavenger hunt and lunch foiled in one fell swoop. (!!!)

But I do have new sunglasses!

The park where the market was located did have some festive trees decorated by different groups, so we had fun looking at those instead. (There were many more than what is pictured here, but you get the idea.)

Then we went to the Habitat for Humanity Restore to see if we could find any treasures. We thought maybe Floridians had good cast-offs. Well, they do, but they have wildly high price tags to match. We found a simple chandelier (wooden) for sale for SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS. Used!!!! Eeek! (!!!)

Since we needed a new lunch plan, we went in search of a Chick-fil-A. Ryan knew he had seen one on our route. We headed that way and managed to drive right past it (!!!). Before turning around, I checked to see if there was another one ahead. There was! So we kept driving. When we arrived, we found it was not a Chick-fil-A at all, but a Chicken Salad Chick! 

THIS was a happy accident. We learned about this restaurant earlier this year, because my friend Pat's mom LOVES IT. There's one north of Indianapolis, apparently. I love chicken salad, so Ryan said we should probably just stop there. We did, and WOW. It was so so so good. If you have one around you and haven't been, you should give it a try!

Ryan got the buffalo chicken salad sandwich and the chicken artichoke soup. I had to SIT DOWN when he told me he got that soup, because I've tried to get him to eat artichokes in things forever and have only been successful once. Get this: he liked it!!

I got a scoop of the original chicken salad and a cup of fruit. Both were delicious. As was the pickle and the tiny sugar cookie. I ate every single bite of everything. I don't usually do that. 

It totally made up for the market fail. 

Then we went to an outdoor mall to look for murals and fun stores. Ryan found a pontoon he loved. 

And then he found the price tag.

We had lots of fun!

After our time of fun, we came back to our Airbnb. We planned to watch the sunset, but it wasn't visible, so we got ready for our next adventure. I'd found that there was going to be a tree lighting/fireworks show/Santa sighting at Baytowne Wharf, which was just down the road from our Airbnb. I had previously picked out a place for us to eat, and we headed over! 

Got to our dinner destination... (!!!!)

So.....we just walked around and took pictures. 

We walked out on the pier to see the boats in the marina:

And found more photo opps...

The tree lighting was supposed to start at 6, so we found a spot on the green and waited. We finally heard a voice over a loudspeaker, and he said he was Santa, and we should look up to see him. There was a zipline right there, so I presumed he was on one of the zipline platforms, but alas, the spotlights didn't seem to be working, and it was already dark, so finding him was...hard. (!!!) We did finally spot his red suit on the platform across the water, and he announced he was going to zoom in. Except it didn't work. (!!!) So he tried again, and it didn't work (!!!). FINALLY, on the third try, we saw the red suit bouncing on the line across the pond below. If you use your imagination, you can see him landing on the platform here in this picture. 

As if by Christmas magic, he was almost immediately on the stage below, even though I distinctly saw his red suit still climbing down the zipline stairs! Ha! He gathered the kids around him, and they sang some Christmas carols.

They did a countdown from ten to light the tree, and right about eight, this happened. (!!!)

And then about one, this happened. (!!!)

Santa and the crowd chanted "Light that tree" for the longest time, and nothing happened. So they tried a second countdown from ten (!!!).

And then, suddenly, the lights came on and stayed. We just had to laugh. Because...of course! The lights were actually very cool when they came on, because they were synchronized to music and made a great show.

Then there was a fireworks show, and I do love fireworks.

We left after that to go back to our condo to scrounge up some dinner and rest for the remainder of the evening. 

Fortunately, I must say, this pretty much ended our (!!!) moments for the trip. There were a few more sprinkled throughout, but nothing insane like the first few days. Even the ones we did have just became funny. I have more stories for next week!

Are We to Plan Z Yet?

When we lost our sunshine just before entering the Sunshine State, we didn't get it back for about three days! So when we got up on our first full day in Florida, we were greeted with haze and humidity. It didn't slow us down from enjoying our breakfast on the balcony! (We brought food with us so we could eat in as much as possible.)

It may not be a pretty Florida view, but it's so hard to care when you're outside in late November without a winter coat! 

Our plan for Friday had been to take a morning walk on the beach, pack a picnic lunch and head for a nearby state park to explore and eat, watch the sunset at the condo, have Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner, and round out the day at a nearby ice cream shop.

We did ONE of those things. As you might imagine, you'll see a lot of the (!!!) spoiled plan moments in today's post. 

The one thing we did? The morning walk on the beach. Goodness, the sounds of waves crashing just never gets old. Amazingly enough, this was the calmest beach we saw all week and was one of the only days the flags weren't red.

Check out this adorable sand art!!

We later learned there had been a pumpkin to the left of the turkey, and it said "always"...but it was destroyed before we arrived. It wasn't the only sand art we saw all week, so stay tuned for more pretties!

Well, the forecast called for storms throughout the afternoon, so going to a park for a picnic seemed a bit on the sketchy side. (!!!) So instead, we made our way down the road to a restaurant Ryan found in an online hunt. It was called the Surf Hut, and we were able to sit on the porch and look out over the Gulf while we ate. Not too shabby!

Oh! I notice I'm sporting the black backup sunglasses (freebies from a Death Wish coffee order years ago) which reminds me that my favorite sunglasses broke right when we arrived in Florida. I'm still sad about it. (!!!) They were possibly my most favorite pair I've ever owned, and I JUST got them this summer.

As we were leaving the Surf Hut, we noticed the car was leaking fluids and making funny sounds. We had actually noticed some car issues right when we arrived the day before, so we were both not surprised and not amused to find them continuing and worsening. As you might imagine, car troubles when over 800 miles from home is not the best news, so our next stop was...

We spent about an hour there (!!!) and I can now mark off my bucket list "soaking in the sun in chair in the Tuffy parking lot." They indicated we were okay for the time being, but we should have the car checked out at home. Their diagnosis included the fact that it was SO HUMID. And that is true. My hair reached Monica Gellar levels, all the papers in our condo warped, and there was actual water just sitting on the tops of cars. Yeah. It was humid. Side note: it is so weird to me to see such a humid day that is also not such a sweltering day. My Indiana self is accustomed to blistering heat accompanying humidity, so that was just so weird.

We made our way back to our condo and decided to walk around exploring for a while. Still no storms, you know. They would have come if we'd gone to that park! (!!!)

I love palm tree lined streets. 

The high-rise on the left is the one where we stayed. 

We didn't have any Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner, as we had planned, since our Thanksgiving dinner had not worked out (!!!) but I had leftovers from lunch, and Ryan ate from the food we brought with us, so we stayed in and had a great night anyway! We elected not to go out for ice cream since we'd gone out for lunch and we'd gotten coffee on our walk. Time to save a little money!

I do have two random things to show you from this day. 

First, this was hanging on the fridge. I am not at all mocking its message. I know some people really don't pay attention to the beach warning flags. But I will say that it was a startling discovery when we arrived for our trip!

And remember how I told you one of the issues with the condo was the lack of extra toilet paper? The property manager told us he would have some sent over to us, and he did! But we had to laugh, because it came via Instacart. There was a knock on the door, and a lady handed Ryan this bag of TP. Ryan told me, "I bet she thinks there is something really bad happening here, when our entire order was a giant bag of toilet paper!"

It may not have been the start to our trip that we planned, and in many ways was not the start we wanted, but it did make for great stories. 

What in the WORLD!?!

 

Ready for some more stories? (Also, please keep in mind from a couple of days ago that a triple exclamation point signals another of our "are you kidding me???" moments of the trip.)

We arrived at our Airbnb around dusk on Thanksgiving night. We learned pretty quickly that dusk comes EARLY in the central time zone. We were basically straight south of our home, but we were a whole hour earlier, so it got dark at 4:45. That is so early!!

Our plan was as follows: arrive at the Airbnb, carry our things from our car to the condo, go to Cracker Barrel for dinner, and then come back to unpack. 

It's adorable when we make plans, isn't it?

Our condo was on the 7th floor of the building, and thankfully they had luggage carts, because it's possible we needed TWO to haul all our stuff. Embarrassing, but true. (We watched the WORST Lifetime movie later in our trip in which the main character moved into her college dorm for a whole semester with one carry-on suitcase, so clearly we're doing something wrong.) 

I want to pause to say that when we were choosing our Airbnb, we were strategic in our selection. We knew we were going to be there for several days, so we wanted the option of a full home, including a kitchen and laundry so we didn't have to eat out every single meal and so we didn't have to pack so much. Oh. Wait. 

We've always had amazing experiences at Airbnbs, but this one started out a little on the rough side. (!!!) To be fair, we called the property manager the day after we arrived, and he was incredibly apologetic, accommodating, and gave us a partial refund on our stay. We were absolutely satisfied with his offering.

We loved the Airbnb itself. It was as cute in person as it had been online, and it didn't reek of cleaners. Unfortunately, that might be because...the condo just wasn't clean. On our first pass through, we found multiple visible cleanliness issues. We also found that there was zero extra toilet paper. That might be okay for a couple of days, but not for as many days as we planned to stay. (I don't want to be unkind to the owner, so I won't outline everything we found, but suffice it to say that it was not at all acceptable or good. Or even remotely clean.)

We decided to bring everything up from our car, go out to eat, and then come back to deal with cleaning and unpacking. But before I do that...would you like to see where we stayed? 

Here is the living room. It had a huge sliding glass door wall that looked out over the balcony and out toward the water.

The living room was open to a dining area and the kitchen.

The master bedroom also had a sliding glass door out to the balcony!

Master bathroom had a soaker tub!!

There was a second bedroom, which we used for luggage storage. And there was a second bathroom, too.

We had a really great sized balcony, too. 

We ended up really enjoying the Airbnb and would recommend it. Like I said, the issues we had were fairly resolved, and the place was extremely comfortable to stay in for the week. (Not just the condo itself, but the whole property.)

So we left to head to Cracker Barrel for dinner. We should have known from the number of people sitting in rockers on the porch that we were in real trouble. It took us about 10 minutes to even get to the hostess to put our names in, and she told us it would be a two hour wait. (We've never done the eating out thing on Thanksgiving, so clearly we underestimated its popularity.) We decided to just place a takeout order instead, but that's when we learned they only serve Thanksgiving food on Thanksgiving. The whole menu isn't available. (!!!) I don't like Thanksgiving food, so eating out had been the whole draw. Ryan could eat traditional fare, and I had already pre-selected from their menu the food I would choose to avoid Thanksgiving food.

Sigh.

We ditched the Cracker Barrel plan entirely and went to the only other place we could find open that night:

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. We got our food to go, took it back to the condo, and ate while we watched football. 

And then, we unpacked and cleaned. Three loads of laundry, a full dishwasher, and half a container of disinfecting wipes later, we felt pretty good about it.

And that's a wrap on arriving in Florida!